Representation of Asians in the West often follows the same script: model minorities, mother/daughter conflicts, and oppressive traditions. In this session, attendees will explore and workshop many different materials, ranging from entire units on media stereotypes to individual readings and assignments that can be plugged into existing units, that teach students how to problematize Orientalist assumptions that fuel Asian racism today.
Blog Archives
What is “real,” anyway? Creating a new 12th-grade ELA course to align with college composition
The co-presenters, a high school and a community college English teacher, collaborated to create a new 12th-grade ELA course under the state’s Transitional Instruction Initiative. The new course more intentionally aligns with first-year college composition. They will share information about the course, their work together as colleagues at neighboring institutions, and how they’ve created a curriculum, along with engaging instructional techniques, to make college a more realistic and tangible option for students that identify themselves as needing extra support in the areas of reading and writing.
How many ways can we come to know a text?
Session D1
This interactive, participatory session will engage attendees in working collaboratively through a short but complex text, engaging all the tools in our repertoire, including, but not limited to, close reading, linguistic analysis, arts-based inquiry, contemporary and historical critical theory, analogical thinking, and reader response. Our goal will be to examine, discuss, and develop classroom approaches that engage a wide swath of strategies, honoring all approaches and equipping ourselves with tools for differentiation.
What’s In Your Bag? Unpacking Implicit Bias
This is a workshop designed for educators at any stage of their career to examine the role of implicit bias, also known as unconscious bias, in both their personal and professional lives. In this workshop, participants will engage in a variety of activities to increase their awareness of implicit bias, and understand the impact of implicit bias on their teaching practice. Participants will learn to recognize how implicit bias shows up in the classroom.
Inquiry & Literacy: Using Authentic Problems and Real Student Conversations to Engage Students
We all want our students to be engaged; we want them to be seen, heard, valued AND captivated by the curriculum. However, as the year goes on, activities like bellringers, team-building exercises, and daily brain breaks become less effective and less engaging, and they don’t generate student excitement about the content of the class. What if it didn’t need to be that way? What if curriculum could be authentically engaging? The presenters will share a guaranteed and viable approach to curricular design that centers current, controversial questions; by putting questions that matter at the center of unit design, teachers are empowered to privilege student voice and meaning-making above student compliance.To make school authentic and exciting, we don’t need to ditch the standards or revamp the reading: we need to shift how we think about teaching and learning, including inquiry-based units, discussion modalities that can be applied to any unit, and strategies to enhance student reading, writing, and overall literacy.
Choosing Literary Texts that Matter Now and Writing About Them in a Way that Does, Too: A Writing-to-Learn Activity that Deepens Analysis, Reflection, and Community
This session will explore resources for relevant text selection and guide participants in a writing-to-learn activity that invites them to weave their own narratives into a literary text to simultaneously develop analytical thinking, writing fluency, self-awareness, and classroom community.
Teacher 101
Do you find yourself run ragged by the demands placed on teachers in a post-Covid world? John Barrett has been teaching for nearly 3.5 decades and has some ideas to share about how to care for your inner teacher.